Audience Analysis Paper
Essay by Greek • May 13, 2012 • Case Study • 1,077 Words (5 Pages) • 1,654 Views
Audience Analysis
Regardless of what type of business, we are employed through; we work with others that have different views on backgrounds and lifestyles. Many with different ethics, attitudes, beliefs, morals, and values that come with diversity in a business. These forms of diversity follow through when conducting a presentation of quarterly sales information to a multitude of diverse parties, the speaker must understand the audience and maintain control of the audience's attention span for the duration of the scheduled meeting. To know whether or not the information they spoke about was retained, it is beneficial to allow questions and feedback during a portion of the meeting. This allows the speaker to keep control of the audience self-performance in how he or she may be doing in presenting their material. This paper will highlight a sales report in which a presenter is asked to characterize the audience, what communication channels should be used to educate the audience and how to ensure the message is effective.
The characterization of the audience is important and probably one of the first things a speaker should acknowledge. Before presenting, a speaker should analyze the demographics of his attendees by age, gender, ethnicity, education level, professional background, and group membership. Because the presenter will be speaking in-person to a group of stakeholders, including managers, salespeople, and customers it may be helpful to categorize these members into subgroups based on the audiences level of interaction with the sales product. To satisfy a diverse audience's needs, address both experience levels and different goals. Produce a information handout for all parties to follow along and speak to one audience group at a time, indicate which group the speaker is addressing and expect that any other audiences may need the same information. When indicating audience objectives within the document, it is important for the reader to incorporate the information material to further educate the audience about the sales product. "Communicating to your peers about the importance of your subject is a process that begins by looking at a typical subject and stripping it down to its core. What remains is a commonly known system called the Three Ts which includes, tell them what you are going to tell them (the introduction), tell them (body), tell them what you told them (the conclusion)" (Shafer, 2010).
The importance for information to be channeled through to the audience as detailed as possible is critical, by doing so it will provide demonstrations or presentations pertaining to the material being educated by using statistical graphs, charts, spread-sheets, and power-points.
Many scholars note that PowerPoint transformed from a tool to the most utilized form of presenting lecture material in higher education (Gurrie & Fair, 2010). A power-point presentation would be most informational as the speaker may present a slideshow on a white screen for the audience to view a multitude of slides that incorporate the sales pitch to managers and salesmen by elaborating statistic rates, fiscal year increase or decrease, and the importance of the product. If the speaker finds the audience sitting with their eyes closed, bodies motionless and their heads slumped over. The body language is read as if they are not interested about the information. This is something the speaker tries to avoid by keeping the audience active and motivated.
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